Yet another politicized genre movie, this one pitched to the #MeToo era
The nonspecific horror of Alex Garland’s Men caters to the “Believe All Women” cant of the Kavanaugh–Blasey Ford political circus — proof that it’s become increasingly impossible to watch movies apolitically, because this film, like so many, is political by stealth. The suspense plot of Men places a single woman, Harper (Jessie Buckley), alone at a centuries-old English country house where threats by strange locals are not just a cracking yarn.
Garland effects the masochistic mood of the #MeToo era. Harper is plucky yet apprehensive, which we’re meant to admire: She wears dresses and brogans. But rather than examine Harper’s mysterious escape from modern London to a distant, nearly primeval location from the patriarchal past, Garland applies sub-Kubrick, sub-Cronenberg formal tricks and horror-movie symbolism.
The film’s style is slanted. Its perspective holds that Woman — Harper picks an apple from a tree and is told it is “forbidden fruit” — is cursed, a doomed victim of inescapable misogyny. Yet enjoying this newly feminist-fangled mythology means sharing Harper’s modern progressivism. Garland discloses that Harper’s retreat follows the grisly suicide of her husband, a badgering, self-confessed weakling (Paapa Essiedu). Flashbacks to their disputes don’t specify the couple’s conflicts; they’re just an interracial couple whose mismatch is vague.
Instead of disclosing the reasons for their incompatibility, Garland falls back on folk allegories, nothing to do with cultural differences brought about by British colonialism but woke prejudice against tradition and weird English country types: the landlord, a cop, a schoolboy, a pub hooligan, a nude freak stalking the countryside, and Harper’s encountering a vicar in a church featuring unusual fixtures. The bizarre statuary includes an ambiguous, grimacing pagan figure with an exposed vagina.
Clearly, Garland isn’t serious; he’s just opportunistic, which is the essential nature of today’s politicized genre movies. Men was produced after Kavanaugh–Blasey Ford and filmed in the spring of 2021 as the controversy fermented. Garland doesn’t seem to understand it but still stirs it up, treating issues of resentment, vengeance, and guilt as claptrap.
“You need to be understood,” the vicar tells Harper, putting his hand on her knee, then leering, “Do you prefer things to be comfortable or true?” This question doesn’t challenge the Kavanaugh–Blasey Ford controversy, but when Harper is told, “You are an expert in carnality. This is your power,” it’s obvious that Garland is trying to have it both ways, so he exploits the public’s weakness for distracting nonsense.
In the manor house with red walls (what Prince and Sheena Easton called “Sugar Walls”), Harper fights off her male assailants, all played by Rory Kinnear in goofy, toothy disguises — he’s a new Philip Seymour Hoffman, not a good thing. The violent, bloody clashes climax with Harper confronting the naked freak who slowly morphs into Groot, then morphs further — exposing three separate vaginal dilations, each giving birth to his own likeness, slipping on its own afterbirth, then finally rebirthing the dead black husband. Blame Garland for any “spoilers” that rip off Denis Villeneuve’s lousy, enigmatic 2013 sci-fi horror film Enemy.
Despite its hallucinatory finale, Men is not really an examination of spousal guilt or women’s fearful psychology (which Anne Fontaine featured in the beautiful mythic revisionism of White As Snow). Plus, it’s too absurd to substantiate the media’s fascination with “toxic masculinity.” Garland’s superficial sexual politics merely dress up hoary gimmicks from Wait Until Dark, Kind Lady, and Repulsion and runs second to Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho.
Buckley’s skilled anguished acting is fast becoming clichéd, but her repeated open-mouthed screams in Men symbolize the Millennial moviegoers’ political misery. The trash in Harper’s head is unwelcome in ours.
